The Sony Reader Daily Edition addresses one of the Touch Edition's ($169.99, ) most glaring weaknesses: the lack of wireless book downloads. It also features a larger, 7.1-inch touch screen, and comes with an AC adapter, unlike its smaller brethren, which also includes the Pocket Edition ($149.99, ). But the Daily Edition's $299.99 (direct) price and poor display contrast make this e-book reader a tough sell, especially since the introduction of the vastly more capable and diverse 16GB Apple iPad ($499, ) with iBooks (Free, ).

Design and Touch Display
The Daily Edition is a classy looking device. It's constructed of aluminum with a black matte finish, and comes housed in a faux leather cover that makes it look like an executive day planner. The gadget itself measures 5.0 by 8.1 by 0.6 inches (HWD) and weighs 12.8 ounces; the cover adds an additional tenth of an inch of thickness. Along the bottom edge is a wireless radio switch, the power jack, a standard-size 3.5mm headphone jack, a mini-USB port, and a volume rocker switch. The right side contains covered expansion slotsmore on those laterwhile the top edge contains a sliding power switch and a hidden stylus for writing on the screen. Five chrome buttons along the bottom control basic functions. Sony also bundles the AC adapter with the Daily Edition, unlike with the Touch Edition; each full charge should be good for about 12,000 page turns.

Last year's Touch Edition was saddled with a tough-to-read, 800-by-600-pixel, 6-inch display with just eight levels of grey. The Daily Edition improves the situation somewhat; the 7.1-inch screen features 600-by-1024-pixel resolution, and supports 16 levels of grey, like the Kindle's screen (except the Kindle's screen is 6 inches). The Daily Edition's touch screen features the same E Ink Vizplex technology as the Touch Edition; it can be read in direct sunlight, but requires a reading light in dark rooms. That's in lieu of a standard, non-touch-enabled e-ink display plus a QWERTY keyboard, as with the Amazon Kindle ($259, ). With the Daily Edition, you can swipe pages back and forth, tap on-screen icons, or even take out the stylus and write directly on the screen, though writing felt a bit stubborn in practice.

Sadly, the Daily Edition's screen is still too dim. Combined with the stylus-driven user interface, reading books on the Daily Edition reminds me of 1990s-era handhelds with passive matrix, monochrome screens with poor contrast, like the original PalmPilot and the Apple Newton. In my tests, reading books on a nearby Barnes & Noble Nook ($259, ) was much easier on the eyes. On the plus side, you can choose from six font sizes; increasing the font size to medium helped. A landscape mode lets you view two almost-square pages side-by-side.

Wireless Downloads and Other Features
You can add books to the Daily Edition in several ways. The big story is the Daily Edition's 3G wireless radio and free AT&T service, which lets you download new content directly to the device anywhere you can get a signal. It also finally gives Sony parity with the Kindle and the Nook. Like Barnes & Noble's e-book store, Sony stocks more than one million e-book titles (Amazon currently tops out at 500,000 books). The Sony store also offers 19 newspapers, including an exclusive Wall Street Journal 'Plus' setup, but unlike its competitors, there are no magazines. Browsing the store is a slow, laborious process; the touch screen requires a very firm press, and as a result, I made several mistakes while I was creating an account. In my tests, the store took over a minute to load the first time; each subsequent page refresh took 10 to 15 seconds, even when it was just refreshing one part of a page. Some button presses did nothing several times in a row. Downloading books was quick, though, thanks to the 3G radio.

As with other Sony readers, you can also install Sony's PC or Mac software, which lets you browse, buy, and download books to your computer. From there, you can transfer eBooks between the computer and device, manage your library, or simply charge the reader while it's connected via USB. The Daily Edition, as with other recent Sony readers, can display PDFs and Word documents, plus BBeB Book, ePub/ACS4, and Adobe Digital Editions. Google Books alone gives you access to about a million free titles. On the audio side, the Reader plays MP3 and unprotected AAC files, and can hook into public library e-book collections. There's 1.6GB of on-board memorytriple that of the Touch Editionand separate SD and Memory Stick expansion slots accept up to 32GB cards.

Competition in the eBook reader space is fierce; and at this price with this screen, it's tough for the Sony Reader Daily Edition to compete. The Barnes & Noble Nook offers a split screen design, with a small color LCD at the bottom for choosing books and configuring the device. It's much easier to read, but its control scheme takes some getting used to. The Amazon Kindle remains a top choice in this category, and it comes with a QWERTY keyboard, although its restrictive file format support and lack of a touch screen are downers. And then there's the iPad; while its much heavier weight and backlit screen may turn some buyers away, it's much more versatileand even acts as a Kindle with Amazon's free app.

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Jamie Lendino is the Editor-In-Chief of ExtremeTech.com, and has written for PCMag.com and the print magazine since 2005. Recently, Jamie ran the consumer electronics and mobile teams at PCMag, and before that, he was the Editor In Chief of Smart Device Central, PCMag's dedicated smartphone site, for its entire three-year run from 2006 to 2009. Prior to PCMag, he was a contributing editor for Laptop and mediabistro.com. His writing has also appeared in the print editions of Popular Science, Electronic Musician, and Sound and Vision,...
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